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Kenyan traditional midwives in frontline of drive to cut maternal deaths

By the time she was three months pregnant, 24-year-old Cynthia Salome had already decided that she wanted her husband's grandmother to be her midwife when it was time to give birth.

She felt more comfortable in the hands of Roselinda Akumu, the oldest midwife in the village of Manyatta, in Kenya's Kisumu county. Akumu, 78, delivered her first baby in the 1960s and has lost count of the number of mothers she has helped.

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